'Phenomenon' is the most mispronounced word

With nine letter and four syllables, the tongue-twisting 'phenomenon' has been named as the most mispronounced word in the English language.

By Jessica Salter

3:57PM BST 18 Sep 2008

The word came first in a study of terms that are tricky to get your tongue around, with most people mixing up the letters M and N on a regular basis.

'Anaesthetist' came second because of quickly moving between the TH to the letters T at the end.

In third place was 'remuneration', which is often mispronounced as 'renumeration'.

With the numbers of Ts and Ss in the word, the fourth most difficult to pronounce was 'statistics' and 'ethnicity' was in fifth place.

Almost half of the 3,000 people surveyed admitted they often correct someone if they say something in the wrong way and a quarter of people said they thought mispronunciation showed a lack of intelligence.

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But suprisingly in the list of admissions, Britons admitted that February was the 12th hardest word to spit out.

A spokesman for Spinvox, a voicemail to text message service, which carried out the research, said: "Many words are difficult to say and when we struggle to pronounce a word correctly it makes us self-conscious about the way we speak.

"Phenomenon is very hard to say because of the structure of the word.

"There are some real tongue-twisters in the list and it's understandable how many people can get confused when pronouncing certain words.

"A word one person finds easy to say, maybe difficult for the next person. Although it's worrying that some people find basic words such as February difficult to say."

The company found that other difficult words to feature in the poll include 'regularly' at 11, 'particularly' at 13 and 'prejudice' at 17.

More than a third of people even say they avoid using words they know they struggle with altogether so they do not end up looking stupid.